Synopsis

Rune Balot is a down-and-out teen prostitute in Mardock City. One day, she's picked up by an ambitious casino manager named Shell who gives her everything she could want. Renewed by a false innocence, a false past, and now the false life Shell has given her, Balot feels grateful. However, she can't help but be curious about why he's done so much for her, so she does some research about his past on a computer. This turns out to be a mistake which will change her life greatly. When Shell finds out what she's done, he attempts to burn her to death by blowing up her car.

Due to the high crime rate in Mardock, a new law called "Scramble 09" has given police carte blanche to take extreme and otherwise illegal measures to revive crime witnesses. With this in mind, they allow a professor to bring Balot back from the brink of death by reassembling her entire body with reinforced synthetic fiber. When she finally wakes up, her confused mental state eventually turns toward revenge as Shell is revealed as her killer.

If there’s one thing that can be said about anime, it’s that it can get quite controversial at times. From the Ecchi genre, to the Horror genre, to the Psychological genre, anime is often presented with scenes of intense language, violence, gore, nudity, sex, and highly questionable themes. Mardock Scramble is one such anime.

The story follows a young Rune Balot, who as a child was raped by her father. Enraged, her brother then proceeds to shoot the father. As her family falls to pieces, Rune grows up as an underage prostitute, and where she is ultimately caught and put in jail. Enter Shell, the
main antagonist of this anime, who gets her out, gives her shelter, offers her his love and support… and then proceeds to blow her up.
Severely injured and on the verge of death, she is then rescued by Dr.Easter , who effectively turns her into a sexy Japanese version of Robocop. She is then given the ability to hack electronics, kick ass, and take names. To bring the crimes of Shell to light, she partners up with Oeufcoque, a highly intelligent electronical mouse that can transform, doubling as; her wardrobe, voice collar, gun, knife, shield, radar, emotional support, and love interest. Effectively putting batman’s utility belt to shame.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, yes this anime is rated R-18+, with themes of rape, incest, prostitution, murder, and impending bestiality. To put into perspective how fucked up this anime gets. One of the villains, is a giant tit sack. . . No really. While his boss, Mr. Pussyhands, gives quite a new meaning to the term “pussyslap”, and takes the act of “masturbation” to a whole new level.

One of the things I can say about this anime, is that it is very dark, and takes itself very seriously. You get a feel for Balot’s fear & mistrust of strangers, her loneliness & desperation, and her pain & anguish. As you begin to comprehend the tormented soul of Rune Balot, you start to get an understanding of what this anime is trying to convey.
A ‘balot’ , or ‘balut’, is an underdeveloped duck embryo. It is a representation of the fragility of Rune’s character as well as her torqued innocence. While Oeufcoque (French for egg shell), serves to protect Rune, both physically and mentally.

This dark and gritty concept, question of morals, and beautiful use of symbolism, makes this an anime I would definitely recommend checking out. The animation is a mix of 3d cg, brilliant slow mo, and fast paced action. While the anime takes very serious tones and displays them in a very serious manner. Which is a nice break from all the mindless violence, gore, sex, and nudity often found in other anime.

I hope you enjoyed this review, and as always, thank you for reading.
(P.S. I wonder what the director’s obsession with eggs is all about though. Dr. Easter, Boiled, Scramble, Balot, Oeufcoque, Shell, and Humpty Dumpty. Now all they need is a character named Sunny Side Up)

Story - Very interesting, but suffered from pacing issues. It moved wayyy too fast and didn't explain what was going on--or why--very well. Then again, some people may like this kind of vagueness that puts the jobs of interpretation and filling in the gaps on the viewer. If they had tacked an extra 20-30 minutes onto it, they could've SLOWED THE HELL DOWN and taken their time.

Art - Incredible, clean, and beautiful, except I'm not a fan of the grain layering they used over the duration of the film. It was different, but not my taste. Watching it
on an HD-TV greatly reduces its gravity, so I recommend that.

Sound - Great sound effects, excellent voice acting (both English and Japanese). But there wasn't a lot of music--and when there was, it didn't stand out very much. Their take on "Amazing Grace" at the end sounded really nice, but wasn't appropriate whatsoever for the mood of the ending.

Characters - The two mains were very well-written and interesting. Balot's backstory was painted very vividly. Her actions are very appropriate for what she's been through. Oeufcocque has an intriguingly quirky personality, which is interesting to see when watching them interact. The rest of the characters, however, are sadly boring and underdeveloped--even Dr. Easter and Shell (the villain). Hopefully this changes over the course of the next two films.

All in all, it's definitely a fun watch worthy of multiple viewings both for enjoyment, and to help yourself understand the story. It's graphic and brutally honest, depicting the world as it truly is. Choice scenes of a nude Balot that would normally be taken as fanservice simply cannot be seen as such--given the situations in which they occur: her being used by men. Looking forward to the next installment. Too bad it was so short.

*Be advised: The sex scenes and nudity are censored in R1 DVD release, and a few scenes were inexplicably removed. Just a word of warning if you're looking to buy the North American version.

This install­ment of Mar­dock Scramble is the first in what’s planned to be a 3-part series. In it, a teen­age pros­ti­tute is killed by the man who took care of her, but she’s brought back to life by some magical sci­ence to try get revenge on her killers. She’s given a robotic body, lots of skin tight cloth­ing and a highly intel­li­gent golden mouse who can trans­form into whatever he wants, nor­mally a gun of some sort.

It’s hard to talk about Mar­dock Scramble without giv­ing out some plot set­ting spoil­ers. People might say that descrip­tions of the plot aren’t spoil­ers at all, but it does
seem a shame to hurt one of the few things this movie actu­ally does very well. The expos­i­tion, often a clunky and tedi­ous part of a movie, was revealed in a gradual course of exchanges between the female lead, Balot, and her mouse sidekick, Eufcoque. Asides from reveal­ing how the world works and what the extents of Balot’s and Eufcoque’s powers are, it also builds up the rela­tion­ship between the two in one of the most strangely charm­ing duos I’ve ever seen. Balot doesn’t exactly think straight, hardly sur­pris­ing given her past, and abuses her powers for vari­ous reas­ons. Eufcoque doesn’t think like a human, see­ing as he’s a mouse and everything, but his mind works off a logic that hauls in Balot and builds a trust between the two. Using the other as a spring­board for fur­ther explor­a­tion, the movie excels in the exchanges between the two that make up about half of the movie.

I did say that this was one of the things that it actu­ally did well, which implies that the movie per­formed less favour­able in other areas. This movie has a lot of grand ideas about how great it is and how it’s explor­ing themes of depres­sion and sexual desires, but most of it is done in such awful fash­ion that parts of the movie come out as unin­ten­tional humour. There’s a group of under­ground sur­geons towards the end of the movie with a taste for attach­ing parts of human bod­ies to them­selves. One guy has eyes all over his body, which was prob­ably sup­posed to be intim­id­at­ing but really just looked stu­pid. There was another guy with breasts sewn all over his body like that ghost from the Fat Stock­ing epis­ode of Panty and Stock­ing. The rest all equally looked like char­ac­ters Apo­ca­lypse Zero. As for the dis­turb­ingly lit­eral nick­name of their leader, Pussy­hands, the less said the better.

These char­ac­ters were prob­ably sup­posed to sym­bol­ise humans liv­ing out their sexual fantas­ies, but like much of the rest of the fore­shad­ow­ing and imagery, it mainly res­ul­ted with scenes in vari­ous degrees of clunky or stu­pid. A bunch of the char­ac­ters are given names related to eggs, such as Boiled and Shell, prob­ably meant to sym­bol­ise birth of a new life or whatever, but that was rather eye-roll indu­cing, like call­ing the viol­ent vil­lain in your show Vicious or some­thing. There were some more stand­ard prob­lems, such as lots of cryptic con­ver­sa­tions that failed to grab the interest, or over­bear­ing level of mad­ness they gave char­ac­ters that didn’t fit well into the story. Oh, and play­ing Amaz­ing Grace as your end­ing song was pretty eye-rolling too.

Not all of the sym­bol­ism failed, to be fair, the rela­tion­ship between Balot and Eufcoque being the best example. Heck, any­thing good about this movie came about when it was just those two together. The best scene in the movie was one where Balot asked Eufcoque to love her, with the golden mouse’s stuttered retort being that he wasn’t cap­able of lov­ing as a mouse and that “I can’t just turn into a male human in order to love you”. The scene, asides from reveal­ing a slightly messed up side to Balot’s mind, also shook Eufcoque and revealed we wasn’t quite as assured and logic­ally per­fect as earlier scenes had you believe.

(As an aside, I kept expect­ing Balot to turn Eufcoque into a dildo. That wasn’t just a dirty mind at play in a highly sexu­al­ised anime. Balot kept going on about how she just wanted someone to love her, with the only way she knew love in her depraved life was through sex, but Eufcoque kept point­ing out that he was just a ves­sel that was incap­able of love and that he was just a tool to pre­tend she was being loved. See where I’m going with this? Con­trast this to our good friend Mr.Pussyhands, who quite lit­er­ally has sex with his hand. I would not be that sur­prised if Eufcoque becomes mas­turb­a­tion aid at some point in the later movies)

Again, this movie only ever good when it was just inter­ac­tions between the main char­ac­ter and her mouse sidekick, the rest of the movie being dumb, some­times pain­fully so. Thank­fully a lot of the movie was just inter­ac­tions between the main two, which is enough to keep my interest to watch the later install­ments. But it’s not enough for me to recom­mend it either.

Spoken by 15-year old prostitute Rune Balot, these are the first words that set the dispirited tone of the anime movie trilogy Mardock Scramble. The story is set in Mardock City, a cyberpunk world where the skyline is filled with skyscrapers, cars glide on fluorescent green roads, and everything sparkles like champagne. It's a stunning place to look at, but it’s also a savage place where cruelty and crime are often left unpunished.

Homicide has become so rampant that the government has authorized a controversial procedure to resurrect victims from the dead to help track down and testify against their
assailants. This is one of the several unusual, and perhaps implausible, concepts in Mardock Scramble, but it's presented with such conviction that it’s not too difficult to get caught up in the moment and suspend disbelief.

The central plot-line, which is essentially about Rune’s revenge, is likely just a catalyst for weightier themes. There are some fantastical action sequences, but the series tends to be more of a character study than a typical action-adventure. The conversations are philosophical, covering a wide range of topics such as the nature of memories and regret, free will, finding a purpose in life, and rebirth.

There’s a lot of hidden symbolism to keep your mind busy if you choose to look for it—such as the egg references that frequently appear. The doctor who performs the resurrection procedure is named Dr. Easter; "scramble" is, of course, one of the ways in which eggs are cooked; and there's a yellow shapeshifting mouse named “Oeufcoque”, which is French for “soft-boiled egg.” What all these egg references mean, I’m not sure.

Mardock Scramble has a consistently abrasive aesthetic. The art is usually shrouded in shadows and textured by noise that must've been hell for the video encoders to deal with. GoHands doesn't appear to have cut any corners or expenses with the animation, which, especially in the action sequences, looks painstakingly detailed. And an electronic and ambient music soundtrack rounds everything off.

If you like science-fiction fantasy with a psychological twist, strong and stylish animation, and don't mind scenes with graphic violence, mental and physical abuse, and nudity, you should definitely check out Mardock Scramble. If you haven't read the synopsis yet, don't. The less you know going in, the more surprised you’ll be. Just sit back and get pounced by it.